A01=Christopher Kempf
American Civil War
Author_Christopher Kempf
battle reenactments
battlefields
Category=DC
Category=DCF
Category=NHWR
Category=NHWR3
Confederate monuments
contemporary poetry
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
Gettysburg campaign
historical poems
John Milton
Lost Cause
memory studies
poetic scholarship
reenactors
Product details
- ISBN 9780807173633
- Weight: 145g
- Dimensions: 151 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 27 Jan 2021
- Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Based on two years living and researching in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Christopher Kempf's What Though the Field Be Lost uses the battlefield there as setting and subject for poetry that engages ongoing conversations about race, regional identity, and the ethics of memory in the United States.
With empathy and humility, Kempf reveals the overlapping planes of historical past and public present, integrating archival materials-language from monuments, soldiers' letters, and eyewitness accounts of the fighting-with reflections on present-day social and political unrest. Monument protests, police shootings, and heated battle reenactments expose the ambivalences and evasions involved in the consolidation of national (and nationalist) identity. As the book's title, an allusion to Milton's Satan, suggests, What Though the Field Be Lost shows that, though the Civil War may be over, the field at Gettysburg and all it stands for remain sharply contested.
Shuttling between past and present, the personal and the public, What Though the Field Be Lost examines the many pasts that inhere, now and forever, in the places we occupy.
With empathy and humility, Kempf reveals the overlapping planes of historical past and public present, integrating archival materials-language from monuments, soldiers' letters, and eyewitness accounts of the fighting-with reflections on present-day social and political unrest. Monument protests, police shootings, and heated battle reenactments expose the ambivalences and evasions involved in the consolidation of national (and nationalist) identity. As the book's title, an allusion to Milton's Satan, suggests, What Though the Field Be Lost shows that, though the Civil War may be over, the field at Gettysburg and all it stands for remain sharply contested.
Shuttling between past and present, the personal and the public, What Though the Field Be Lost examines the many pasts that inhere, now and forever, in the places we occupy.
Christopher Kempf is the author of the poetry collection Late in the Empire of Men. His work has appeared in the Believer, Best American Poetry, the Kenyon Review, the New Republic, PEN America, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. Kempf teaches in the MFA program at the University of Illinois.
